


the end, the beginning

by Storynerd



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 14:11:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15366375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Storynerd/pseuds/Storynerd
Summary: “When he first found me, I didn’t really believe him until he’d got down about a gallon of Veritaserum,” Remus said.A deleted scene from hollimichele's 'the dogfather'. Remus finds a fugitive on his doorstep.





	the end, the beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the dogfather](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13760487) by [hollimichele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele). 



> This is a "deleted scene" from the (brilliant) dogfather by hollimichele. As such, it won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read that, as it's set in an AU, where Harry is adopted by Muggles instead of being taken in by the Dursleys. So you should probably go read that first (you should probably go and read it first anyway, because it's awesome) .

_“When he first found me, I didn’t really believe him until he’d got down about a gallon of Veritaserum,” Remus said._

 

* * *

 

 

It’s already dark by the time Remus arrives home from work. He’s tired; a bone-deep exhaustion that he can’t seem to shake these days. Sometimes he wonders if he’s been well rested at any point in the last two years. But it’s been worse recently, ever since that story broke in the Daily Prophet. Harry’s aunt and uncle, murdered in their house and the tell-tale signs of magic clear for anyone in the know to see. Baby Harry, missing, possibly dead. Sirius – the though of him still a sharp, crystalline pain, even after two years – on the run. It dredges up far too many memories and Remus feels sick with it all, guilt and grief and fear and anger thick in his throat all the time, no relief even when he tries to sleep. It almost makes him look forward to the swell of the moon, still a couple of weeks off. At least the wolf can’t get tangled up in emotions.

It’s raining, a thin, unpleasant drizzle that has long since saturated his clothes. The streetlights on his road are acting up again, a dodgy bulb flickering on and off as he walks towards the run-down terraced house that he can only just afford to rent. The yellowish light strobes across the bins on the pavement, the row of parked cars, the stray dog by his door, the badly pruned hedges with their wet, sagging leaves. It doesn’t help the headache that’s been building behind his eyes since mid-afternoon, and he digs in his pocket for his keys, keen to get in and out of the –

His brain catches up at last, and he freezes in his tracks.

_The stray dog._

He lets go of the keys and grips his wand instead. An icy feeling has settled in his stomach, and he raises his head slowly, eyes pinned on the black shape tucked into the lee of the porch roof.

Sirius Black stares back through canine eyes.

 _Maybe I should have predicted this,_ Remus thinks. It had been too much to hope that some faint remaining sense of loyalty would stop Siriu- stop _Black_ coming to track him down. Maybe killing him himself instead of just betraying him was a show of respect to what they’d once been. Still, his neighbours don’t deserve to be caught up in this; he has to get that dog off the street before things turn violent. Enough innocent lives have been lost already.

He steps closer and, to his surprise, the dog shrinks back slightly, ears flattening in a show of submission. It doesn’t fool him, not any more.

“Come to finish the job, have you?” he asks. His voice sounds too loud, too cold, like a stranger.

The dog whines, high and thin, and drops lower, belly scraping the wet pavement. It shakes its head. Remus shakes his too, dislodging any thought of believing that. It’s trust like that that killed James and Lily.

Still. They can’t be doing this out in the open.

“Get inside.” It’s probably a mistake. But when he unlocks the door the dog slinks in, tail low, still half crouching to the floor. Remus tries not to notice how prominent his bones are beneath the filthy, matted hair. He shuts the door, puts the chain on automatically without turning his back on the dog as it pads from the dark entryway into the harsh blue light from the overhead fluorescent strip in the kitchen. Remus takes a breath, just one, to steady himself, and pulls out his wand.

“No one can see in, so you might as well show yourself properly,” he says, still cold. The dog blinks once, then there’s an unfolding that is somehow still achingly familiar, and Sirius Black is standing in his kitchen, dressed in rags, filthy, and swaying slightly like he’s a few seconds away from falling over. Still, he fooled Remus once into not seeing the threat until it’s too late. He won’t make that mistake this time.

“Make any sudden moves and I’ll Stun you and have the Aurors here before you can even think a curse,” he says. Black nods, slowly, eyes huge and hollow-looking. It’s hard to read the emotion on his face; it’s been two years, but he looks about 10 years older, cheeks hollow, skin almost grey.

“Moony- ” he starts, and Remus _flinches_ , so hard he almost hexes him by accident as his grip tightens on his wand. “Remus,” Black corrects quickly, “Remus, please. You have to believe me. It wasn’t me.”

“Bull _shit,”_ Remus chokes out over the sudden swell of rage in his throat. To betray James and Lily, to betray their _best friends,_ and then to _lie_ about it –

“It wasn’t. I swear, on my life, I wasn’t their Secret Keeper. _Please,_ ” he says, desperation ragged at the edge of his voice.

Remus should just Stun him right now and Floo the Ministry to pick him up. But a tiny part of him, the part he’s tried to ignore for the past two years, that wants to believe he didn’t fail to notice his boyfri- _Black_ plotting to murder his best friends right under his nose, suddenly takes over his mouth, and he hears himself ask: “Who was then? If not you, then who?”

“Peter.”

The cold washes over him again. Peter. He’s felt guilty about how little he’d managed to see of him in the months leading up to James and Lily’s deaths. Probably hadn’t had any contact beyond the odd brief letter for three months, four, before Sirius Black blew a hole in the street and wiped Peter off the Earth. But if it’s true –

Remus steps into the kitchen, watching Black shrink back a little, and picks a bottle out of his potions cupboard, hands only shaking a little.

“Drink this,” he says, holding out the Veritaserum. “All of it, and say that again.”

Black takes it, downs the entire bottle in a couple of gulps, and looks him steadily in the eye.

“I was not James and Lily’s Secret Keeper. I did not betray them. Peter Pettigrew did.”

It feels a little like the floor has vanished from beneath Remus’s feet. He sits down, slowly, in the rickety kitchen chair and gestures vaguely at the other. Even slower, Sirius pulls it out and settles into it like he’s not really sure how a chair works.

“I think,” Remus says, voice far calmer than he feels, “that you should probably start from the beginning.”

 

* * *

 

 

By the time Sirius runs out of voice, it’s past midnight. Remus feels a bit like he’s been slapped around the head. Or possibly like someone has reached into his life and twisted it through 45 degrees; everything is off balance. The solid anchor points of his world have shifted, dissolved, like smoke.

He stands up, legs protesting at sitting for so long, and moves robotically to the kettle. In a time of crisis, he switches to default. Two mugs, two teabags. Milk, a few days old but still fresh enough. He needs the warmth, the comfort, but he also needs the excuse to look away from Sirius, to try to collect his thoughts. He’s spent two years wondering how he could have not known that Sirius was capable of such a deep, _awful_ betrayal. Now his head is spinning, trying to fit around the idea that he didn’t, couldn’t. Would never have. That’s without even getting into the fact that Peter – skittish, quiet, desperate for attention Peter – had been working with Voldemort. Had betrayed James and Lily. Had framed Sirius and condemned him to the horrors of Azkaban. Sirius had stopped the story there, skipping straight to his escape, but he’d gone a shade paler under the dirt, and that said enough.

Remus sets the second mug of tea down in front of him, and Sirius stares at it like it might bite him before he picks it up, awkward, like his hands can’t remember how it works. Remus sits, fingers curled round his own mug, and stares blankly at the peeling plastic top of his kitchen table.

“Remus, can you – can you just say something, please?” Sirius’s voice is rough as sandpaper, not used to talking, and so unsure that Remus can’t fit it at all with how Sirius _should_ be, how he is in the happy, agonising memories of _before._

“It’s rather a lot to take in,” he says, and his voice sounds very far away to his own ears, like he’s underwater. “You see, I spent the last two years trying to get over the fact that three of my best friends died because of my – ” _boyfriend,_ he chokes on, and takes a sip of tea to recover before he carries on. “I might need a moment to accept the fact that I watched the wrong man be imprisoned for it.”

Sirius nods, guilt etched so deep on his face that it might well be permanent. Then he lowers his gaze to the table top. “I missed you,” he says to the mug of tea in front of him, and it feels like the air is all squeezing out of Remus’s lungs.

 _I felt like part of me had been cut out,_ he doesn’t say. _I hated you, and I missed you so much I could barely breathe. I thought I was so blind to have missed you planning it._

_God, how could I have thought you’d do it?_

The rush of guilt catches him by surprise, burns his eyes and his throat. He breathes out, slow, waits for it to pass before he tries to speak. “What are you going to do now?”

Sirius picks at a ragged bit of plastic on the edge of the table. “I don’t – I’m not sure. I didn’t really make a plan.”

“But you came to me.”

“I had to.” He looks up, meeting Remus’s eyes through the dark fringe of his eyelashes. “Moony, God, even though you should have hexed me into oblivion on sight, I couldn’t _not_ see you.”

It feels like someone is gripping his insides. Squeezing. Crushing. “I don’t know why I didn’t,” he says, only half truthful. _I’m not sure I could ever hurt you._

“Do you want to shower?” he asks instead. Sirius is, to put it bluntly, disgusting. But more than that, Remus would quite like five minutes on his own, to process, and maybe to have a minor breakdown.

“I – yes, thanks.”

Remus guides him down the hall to the bathroom, grabs a towel and some clothes of his at random. Once the door shuts, he goes back to the dingy kitchen, sits down, and slumps forward until his head is resting on the cool surface of the table, eyes closed. His thoughts whirl, so fast that they blur together, like static on an untuned TV. It’s too much. Too much. All the agony from two years ago has been dragged violently back to the present day and it’s like losing James and Lily all over again. But it’s not the same; the first time, it was losing Sirius too, and that had almost hurt worse, forcing him to move out of the flat where everything felt branded by his touch, the bed that would never be free of his imprint. Even the full moon hadn’t been enough to scrub away the places on his skin where Sirius had touched him. And now – now he’s back, there, but it’s not the same, it can’t be. It’s like having a stranger in the house. A ghost. Everything feels unsteady. Like the world isn’t even real. Remus’s hands clench tight, fingernails digging into his palms.

And a hand touches his, gentle, and he starts, lifting his head and trying to not to wince at the sudden brightness as he opens his eyes. Sirius is stood next to him, wet hair curling down around his shoulders, hand already drawn back to his side, and there’s concern written on his face alongside the exhaustion. Remus blinks, getting him into proper focus, and he suddenly looks far more like the boy he remembers now he’s clean, even as gaunt as he is now. He offers a weak smile, and it feels like someone has filled Remus’s heart with crushed glass. He drops his head back down, because if he keeps looking, he’ll probably cry. He feels a touch at his shoulder, so fast that he could have imagined it.

“I can leave,” Sirius says, uncertain (and even that is wrong, when has he ever known Sirius to be uncertain?).

“Don’t,” he says, with a fierceness that shocks him. “Don’t go. I’ve –” he stops himself. _I’ve lost you once already. I’ve lost enough people. I’ve missed you, too._ He’s not sure which ending to the sentence he’d choose. “I’ve got space,” he settles on in the end, everything else too raw to put into words. “It’s a Muggle neighbourhood. You can lie low for a bit. Until you decide what to do.”

Sirius nods. He goes to say something, but then stops, reconsiders. “I need to find him,” he says at last. “Harry. I need to know what happened, if he’s – ” _If he’s dead,_ Remus can fill in the blank, but doesn’t say it. Neither of them need to explore that thought.

“We need to find him,” he says instead, firmly. Sirius looks momentarily surprised, but he nods. Then yawns.

“Sorry,” he says, trying to cover it and largely failing. It’s an acutely familiar gesture, like for a second they’ve transported back in time to the Gryffindor common room.

“It’s late,” Remus says, somehow finding enough strength in his legs to stand again. The default routine kicks in again. “I’ll get the spare duvet, you can sleep on the sofa.” It’s… absurd, in a way. He’s offering a wanted escaped convict a duvet. But he doesn’t know what else to do. How else to process this.

He can let it lie, he decides, for one night. Maybe it will be clearer in the morning.

As he passes Sirius, he stops, just for a moment, and grips his shoulder, tight, feels it solid under his hand. Real.

“I missed you, too,” he says, forcing it out before he loses his nerve, and escapes down the hall to the airing cupboard.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you catch any typos or other errors - I'm pretty rusty at this whole writing thing!


End file.
